Beach Wedding(2)

“Five,” Tom said, staring at me calmly.

“Five? What do you mean? Five what?”

He looked at me again silently for a beat before I got it. If I hadn’t already just swallowed my beer, I probably would have spit it all over him.

“That’s impossible! Five hundred grand? Half a million dollars for the season?” I said in shock.

“Oh, no,” my brother said, chuckling softly as he shook his head.

He gave me another wink as he brought his own beer to his lips.

“That’s just for July, Terry,” he said. “Just July.”



2

“Just for July?” my wife, Vivian, said.

It was half an hour later, and we were upstairs in one of the mansion’s dozen huge white-on-white Ralph Lauren photo shoot bedrooms.

It seemed like everything in the interior of the massive beach house was a blazing brilliant white. I’m talking everything. The ceilings, the walls, the couches, the intricate millwork, the slender Euro chairs.

And just when all the blazing whiteness wasn’t done with you, your mind had to try to wrap itself around the size of the rooms. Because it just didn’t compute. Even upstairs, the ceilings had to be fifteen feet high.

If the house were a museum, it was as if we now had the Egyptian section all to ourselves.

“Just for July?” Viv said for the second time.

“That’s what the man said,” I told her from where I was lazing back shirtless and barefoot in the center of a huge bed that had perhaps once belonged to Henry VIII or maybe Genghis Khan.

“But that’s like—”

“Sixteen thousand one hundred and twenty-nine dollars,” I said, having already done the math on my phone. “A day.”

“Oh, my goodness! How? How, Terry?” Viv said in a frantic whisper as she carefully closed the top drawer of the priceless-looking white bureau she was unpacking our stuff into.

I smiled over at my wife. Just out of the Carrara marble cave of the shower, she was in a fluffy bathrobe, her golden blond hair up in a towel. She was six months pregnant with our second kid, and the bathrobe in the front was having its work cut out for it.

“Tom’s this rich?” she said, waving around some electric hair wand thing at our soaring royal slumber chamber. “But this is like billionaire rich, right? I mean, is he on the Forbes list now? Wouldn’t your mom have told us? She sends us the link every time he’s on CNBC.”

“Hey, who knows?” I said, leaning even farther back into the posh wilderness of throw pillows with a yawn. “Maybe it’s business or something. Maybe he needs to impress his Wall Street buddies and clients. How many people are going to be at this wedding? What did my sister say? Three hundred?”

“Four hundred and fifty,” Viv said, biting at a nail.

“Four hundred and fifty? That’s not a wedding, that’s a college graduation ceremony! We had what?”

“Fifty-four maybe?” my wife said with a shrug.

“Exactly! A human amount of people. My goodness. Four hundred and fifty. I told you Tom is crazy. But I guess he knows what he’s doing. At least I hope so. In the meantime, I have no problem playing along. Pass the champagne and lobster, lovey darling, would you?”

“We’re out of champagne, my liege, but will this do?” my wife said, removing a bottle of the superb craft beer Tom had introduced me to upon our arrival from a mini fridge beside the writing desk in the corner.

Tom really had thought of everything, I realized as I settled the cold soothing glass over my belly button.

“Do you think the car is parked okay where it is?” Viv said, frowning toward the sliding doors of the suite’s ocean-view terrace.

“It’s fine, Viv. I’m sure the staff buried our Honda CR-V real deep,” I said as I cracked open the beer with the opener Viv handed me.

“I’m sure they’ve been around the block a time or two,” I said after a cold sip. “They must know that sometimes the have-nots arrive from the lower classes. I’m sure these frightfully embarrassing things happen from time to time.”

I laughed as Viv stuck her pretty little tongue out at me.

What was really funny was that right at that moment as I lay there, I actually was quite content with my life. I had a great, beautiful wife of five years. We had the world’s cutest three-year-old daughter, Angelina, sleeping in the adjoining room, along with another kid (that I was hoping hard was a boy) on the way.

As the lead sergeant of the Philly police department’s busiest street crime squad, I even had a challenging, exciting, meaningful day job.

I was thirty-nine, happy and healthy, with good hard-charging work to do and several drop-dead cute someones to love. I mean, what the heck else in the world was there?

But I understood where Viv was coming from. I, too, being one of those mere mortals with a less than seven-figure-a-year salary, had thought I might feel envious or competitive or at least somewhat insecure about Tom’s Southampton wedding extravaganza.

But as I sat way back on the California king-size bed, hand-crafted probably from some special species of thousand-year-old endangered wood, I was suddenly oddly cool with it.

This was Tom’s life, I decided, lazing there like an extra in an overpriced perfume commercial. We were just visiting. There was beer and sunshine. It was fine.